by S. T. Joshi
“From what quarter does this danger come?”
“From ancient Babylon.”
His expression told me that I must not laugh. But I could not help smiling. “Is this more Professor Nuttery?”
“Yes.” He drew an envelope from his side pocket. “Here are a couple of offprints of articles I wrote that the pedantic—excuse me, respectable—journals never would publish. The information is solid and I believe my theories are equally solid. If you add them to your already ponderous reading assignment, we may save time—and even lives.”
I took them from him. “Do my best,” I said, “as soon as I can.”
“Be careful. Now you are involved.”
4.
I PHOTOCOPIED THE PASTERBY DOCUMENTS FOR MY research, secured the originals in the office safe, and carried the copies to my house for the weekend. To pay them closest attention from Friday until meeting with Olsen on Monday, I desired the quiet comfort of my home.
My pair of housekeepers had cleaned and ordered the rooms; they were spotless and cheerful. They had stocked my larder following my list and I had attended to the liquorous necessities. My customary loneliness was to be alleviated by my labors.
I began on Friday afternoon almost as soon as I got home.
Pasterby Number One was the main subject of my focus. His son, the second Robert, was not an entirely colorless person, but he stood well within the long, dark shadow of his parent. He was a competent businessman, though he lacked a strong aggressive nature. Nor did he possess his own son’s, Robbie’s, smiling insouciance and gift of chat. He once described himself as “a hyphen between Robert I and Robert III.” He even allowed the daughter of his father’s Leetha Choney to be installed in his own household. Thinking upon the situation, I came to believe that this arrangement would have been at the father’s insistence. Following the first, the two latter Leethas were darksome legacies.
I was beginning to form an idea of the general shape of this self-involved clan. There was a thick, twine-bound packet of papers recording business transactions with Rast Choney, Leetha’s father. Rast worked in metals, tin, brass, and silver. These skills probably suggested the common notion that he was a gypsy. But he was more than an itinerant tinker; his financial dealings with Pasterby were complex, sometimes hard for me to follow. But at some point he had become aggrieved and the records broke off inconclusively.
I spent only a little time on these financial affairs. I needed, I thought, to look into the more personal pages the grandfather had penned. When I unloaded the Xeroxes from my briefcase, Olsen’s articles slid out. One was “Probabilities of Disruption of Linearities and Symmetry in Parallel Space-Time Continua,” an offprint from Physico-Philosophical Papers, a journal published, according to the acknowledgment note, at Nordberg University in Uppsala. The P-P Papers was not a prestigious publication, I surmised, so this would not be one of Olsen’s more highly regarded articles, like those published in Journal of American Oriental Society and Revue d’Assyriologie. The biographical headnote listed these among his other credits in a rather defensive manner.
The second paper was a résumé of recent historical research about the resurgence of an ancient Lilith cult in Goray, Poland, and the disastrous aftermath. I glanced through it, laid it aside, and went back to the first, hoping to gain some notion of what Olsen wanted me to look for. I began tentatively.
A fair amount of its substance was already familiar to me, for instance, the hypothesis of unbroken genealogical lines originating in Sumer, Akkad, Elam, and the neighboring territories. And here again was his notion of continually recurring patterns of landowner-dependent relationship. His speculations about parallel time continua in which it was possible for ancient Babylon and our contemporary universe to exist simultaneously with several levels of energy-barrier dividing them he had partially outlined in the lecture I had attended at Hillman. In this article he went further, to extrapolate on what might happen if the science of the ancient priests and geometers happened at some points to become congruent with our contemporary scientific discoveries so that the barriers between the continua could be breached.
The most fanciful aspect of this possibility he relegated to a footnote: “One might wonder what would happened in our contemporary society if there suddenly appeared Hanbi, king of the wind-demons, or Ninurta, prince of the Underworld, or Bine his gatekeeper, or Lilit, bringer of death.” This scenario was tucked away in a note overloaded with source references; Olsen seemed to want to camouflage it with apparatus.
He followed the same strategy again in a later passage, answering an imagined objection that these elder gods and occult forces would have no motive to try to force their ways through the gates of twentieth-century civilization. “Some of the gods, as they were conceived, were by nature inimical to humankind and existed only for the purpose of doing it harm.” And again: “It was in character for these gods to extend their domains, to gain territories physical and psychical. They did not reason; they acted out of blind tropisms.”
Olsen’s footnotes embodied the heart of his thesis; the article itself was couched in the usual academic jargon, opacity overlying opacity, festooned with quotations in German, French, and ancient Semitic languages. As I read along, I was uncertain how seriously he intended his readers to accept his exotic hypotheses. Even though he supplied an amount of mathematical reasoning unusual in an archeological article, the parallel-universe notion seemed far-fetched. It recalled to me some of the happy hours of youth when I read devotedly through the pages of Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, and other futurists who dreamed sidewise about the shape of things to come.
On the last page, below the text, the professor had scribbled a personal note to me: “Please do not dismiss these suggestions from consideration. I have evidence that the continua barriers are in danger of being compromised. I repeat—your friend Pasterby may be in danger, along with those connected with him. I am utterly serious. H. O.”
If I understood Olsen’s warning as he intended, I must keep alert for similarities, any close parallels, between occurrences separated in time. The household situations of the three Roberts were one example, each of them closely associated with the Choney family that lived on a plot of ground bordering the eastern part of the estate. And each paterfamilias had installed, or allowed to be installed, succeeding Choney daughters as live-in maids. Here were parallels of a large pattern, but the similarities were general and would have occurred in other landowner families also. A more particular event or incident must find its parallel for Olsen’s theories to be strengthened.
* * *
With these thoughts not very clearly in mind, I turned to the grandfather’s dream journal. In my capacities as appraiser and curator of family papers I have read through a number of such chronicles. The recording of dreams used to be a common practice within a society thoroughly self-involved and with large amounts of leisure time to dispose of.
The dream-journal of Robbie’s grandfather followed the general masculine pattern. The entries were brief and mostly devoid of commentary. Most of the subject matter was ordinary stuff, erotic visions or scenarios of flight and pursuit or public embarrassments. But one dream was recurrent and was noted no fewer than a dozen times.
A typical entry read like the first: “On caravan in a desert land headed toward mtn. Cant tell who is with me. Come to mtn & climb up to cave. Big grave mound or the like. Crawl over and come to steps….”
I made notes on these repeated fragments and was able to piece out a fairly coherent narrative. The grandfather in his dream is engaged in a quest for something he cannot name. In a cave mouth near the top of a mountain in an unknown land is a great hall or other immense space with a black marble table or altar. This shadowy space is ringed with robed and hooded presences, mute and motionless. Upon the marble slab is a pale trough-like vessel, probably carved from alabaster. Inside it lies an object that Pasterby’s dream-self must grasp and bring away to his actual home, his mansi
on in Queen City, North Carolina. He does not wish to do so but is compelled by the force of another’s will. He stretches his hand toward the vessel—and then awakes. He experiences upon waking a feeling of acute disappointment.
All the accounts of this recurrent dream were pretty much the same until a final one. The last narrative broke off just where the others did, but Pasterby recorded for the first and only time the events that followed upon his awaking.
He woke shouting loudly in terror. Leetha, who was taller than she normally stood, watched him from the foot of the bed with her calm, almond-shaped eyes. Her eyes were enlarged.
He was overcome with anxiety. Where was the object? This last time he had actually laid his hand upon it and brought it away. But his hand is empty. His face is painful. There was a fiery, orange-white, sudden explosion when he grasped the artifact. He must have been singed.
Olsen had told me to look for close similarities, for events that corresponded to one another in outline, if not in detail. I recognized the recurrent dream of his grandfather as the same one Robbie had experienced. The terms were different: The grandfather’s dream took place in an unknown desert land while Robbie’s took place upon his home estate. But the narrative was the same: a quest for an object in a dangerous situation, the urgency of the mission, the climactic explosion, and the powerful sense of loss upon awakening.
Olsen had written in his essay a scientific rationale of how the barriers between the Babylonian continuum and our own might break down. I could not follow the reasoning. If L, the Lorentz group of space-time coordinates, is transformed by the quantum set of vectors, H, a reciprocity is established, so that the continua may mesh, though different energy-level states would cause small but powerful local explosions.
The symmetry that had to be established between the continua was the joining of the halves of the artifact. Somewhere on the grounds of the Pasterby estate lay the missing piece. It came to me now that it would be the office of Leetha to join the parts. The mechanics of the event I would never comprehend.
The other, shorter paper on a historical irruption of the ancient god-figures into Poland caught my eye, but I could make myself read no more.
5.
I HAD RESEARCHED NOW FOR FOUR HOURS WITHOUT letup. The early afternoon showed overcast and windy in the bay window of my study. I pushed the Pasterby materials away from me and rose and paced the worn Persian rug. Some thought was moving about just beyond my consciousness, like a beetle behind wainscoting.
I decided to clear my head with a chilly, brisk walk.
My habitual excursion took me two blocks south on Oakley Street to a small, rock-walled park almost in the center of Queen City. I dressed for the look of the weather, plucked my rosewood walking cane from the umbrella stand, and locked the door behind me.
It was a little before four o’clock and the hour was as cold as its aspect had promised. Three spacious parks lie on the outskirts of town, but Cornwallis Park, small and densely wooded, with neat, winding paths, was the one to which I often resorted to unclutter my brain of tedious legal details. In spring it was colorful with flame, coral, and white azaleas, an Impressionist profusion along its four borders. In this bleak December light the tree trunks stood stark and unmoving, though the bare top branches whipped in the wind.
Once I entered from the gateway on Oakley and continued the downward path to the streamlet that cut through the declivity, I thought the light was different here than along the deserted street. The dimness was suffused with a whitish orange glow for which I could discern no source of emanation. This was not a steady light; there were motions within it, slow undulations like the rise and fall of yearning energies.
As I continued I heard a rustling in the duff and fallen leaves. It was innocuous at first, and it took it to be four or five squirrels scrambling about. But the sound grew louder and surrounded me and I began to grow apprehensive. The noise was not random; it was an organized sound.
I felt a presence of some sort, not as if I were being watched—as if I were being known and had been known from a former time.
My feelings of confusion and dread heightened as I reached the bottom of the hill and paused at the point where a small, picturesque stone bridge overarched the streamlet. Beyond this point, about fifteen yards away, the underbrush left off and opened onto a lawn where children often played. But now from the undergrowth emerged a force of rats. They were gathered into a delta-like formation which grew in size till it resembled a flood; they appeared to be marshaled into this formation by some power of will not their own. The mass of them kept enlarging; there must have been thousands. They were headed away from me, away from the park. If they kept moving in the direction they were pointed, they would enter the downtown area. They poured around an overgrown bend in the stream and disappeared from my line of vision.
I sat down on the ledge of the little bridge and drew deep breaths. Above me stood an old, very tall, black oak. It was a communally beloved object, a great tree that in decades past had sported a wide canopy. In latter years its age began to show and it became hollow, sheltering a large bee colony. This past year the colony had collapsed and the tree had begun to lean. Only public sentiment kept the park crews from taking it down.
Now from the large open crease that ran down the upper third of its length a black-winged creature emerged, twitching its torso as if it were shrugging off an outer garment. But the way its wings were folded about it made it look as if it were an overcoat, oversized and enveloping.
I had seen her only three times before, but I now recognized Leetha with her long black hair and her large almond eyes that shone bright black in the cold dimness. Her features were distorted, the eye-shapes pulled back until they were nearly slit-like, the cheekbones protrusive, the chin tapered sharply. She was almost directly above me, but a thick limb obscured her legs and feet. She leaned forward from the trunk and teetered precariously for a moment. Then she opened her wide wings with their taloned ribs and, with extreme effort, raised them to shoulder height and launched herself into the pulsing air.
Large as she was, she was quickly lost to sight among the naked trees with their intricate network of limbs against the gray and black clouds overhead.
The orange-white light that tinged the atmosphere grew brighter, the white gathering to a crackling intensity. Then it flashed out like an immense arc-spark and subsided immediately to its former degree of intensity.
My face and hands tingled from the eruption, and I lost the ability to see for a good while. When my eyes readjusted I could find no trace of the Leetha-creature with the black overcoat that became wings, with the dark gaze that took my measure unthinkingly.
My knees trembled so that when I tried to stand I collapsed back onto the stone ledge.
The barrier had been violated. Lilithian Babylon was entering my world.
I sat for a space in blank confusion, fearful of the threat of things I could not picture. Olsen’s warnings had made their case. I had better get home quickly, I thought, and rose unsteadily and walking, punching the ground determinedly with my cane.
The park that had been deserted before my arrival now seemed even emptier. No birds sang. The fitful breezes rustled no foliage. All was as still as if time had suspended.
I strode along as quickly as I could. If what I feared had already taken place, there would be no safe haven anywhere in the region, but I wanted to feel to comfort of my house around me. I wanted to boil a pot of Earl Grey tea and sit with it in silence.
But there on my front stoop stood Dr. Olsen. His expression was troubled, his words impatient. “We must go at once to the Pasterby house. Here is my car.”
It sat at the curb with the motor running.
“The barriers are down,” I said. “The continua are joining.”
He nodded curtly and gestured and we hurried to squirm into the car. Olsen put it in gear and pressed the accelerator. His face was pale, his lips tight.
“What can we do?” I
said. “The pieces of the Opener must have joined, though I don’t see how it could have happened.”
“Pasterby brought the artifact home with him, did he not? He could not find it when he woke from his dream, but it was close by. Leetha saw it and, without understanding her own actions, brought it into contact with the half she already had in her possession.”
“How did she come to have it?”
“It would have been among the trinkets the enraged Aunt Cassie flung into the yard. Leetha would have found it and kept it as a curiosity. Or her father, Rast, might have recognized it and laid it by. He is the unknown figure in the narrative. He harbored ill will toward Robbie Pasterby because of some transaction or other—”
“But we are helpless, are we not? The pieces are joined. The rest is physics, as you described in your essay.”
“There are some possibilities,” he said. “Did you read the other paper on Goray?”
“I did not. My eyes gave out. It seemed to be some sort of historical theory.”
He cut a quick glance at me, then concentrated on driving. The sky was closing in and the streets of the town were nearly empty. On the sidewalk and in the gutters poured a red-eyed stream of rats. Olsen paid them no heed.
“It was no theory. It digests the fullest account that we have of a former breakdown of the barriers. This took place in a shtetl outside Lublin in Poland in 1665. There the forces of Babylon, in the guise of Lilith, gained control and the laws of nature broke down. In the following years over one hundred thousand died, most of them devout Jews whose faith the gods feared and despised. Lilith chose a woman named Rechele as her instrument, a woman very like our Leetha …” He fell silent and shook his head. “This is no time for a history lesson.” He launched us faster along the empty road. The town lay behind us now.